How do you make decisions about your company’s digital marketing strategy? If you said, “We look at audience analytics data,” that’s the right answer! Businesses that track performance metrics for marketing are 500% more likely to see a return on investment. Among the free tools for tracking website metrics, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager stand out. Which should you use?
Which Is Better: Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager?
Comparing Google Analytics to Google Tag Manager is apples to oranges. A better comparison in this case would be someone asking whether vitamin C or fruit is healthier for your body. They’re related but different, and one can’t replace the other. Far from fighting each other, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager make a great team.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you track people’s actions when they visit your website. Google Analytics 4 is the latest iteration, and it brings event-based tracking. With GA4, you can keep tabs on a huge range of audience behaviors and key performance indicators:
- Total active users
- Email signups
- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Conversions
- Average engagement time
GA4 can show you how many people visit your site each month, which pages are the most popular, and how effective different types of content are for conversions. You can view all this information within GA4 or send it to a third-party digital marketing platform like Semrush or HubSpot.
What Is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager is a tool that helps you coordinate tracking tags for your website, social media accounts, YouTube videos, store pages, and other locations. To understand why this is a big deal, you first need to know a few terms.
Tags, Cookies, and Tracking Pixels
Cookies, pixels, and tags all have the same purpose: keeping track of user actions. Cookies are connected to clicks and paid search ads. Pixels/tags can track non-click metrics like how long someone spends on your page or how far they scroll.
Triggers
Triggers are code instructions that determine when an event gets tracked. In the real world, cities use triggers to count the number of cars that cross an intersection. For websites, triggers include clicking a button, loading a page, closing a page, watching a video, and similar actions.
JavaScript
A JavaScript snippet is a small piece of code you can add to web pages, website builders, or content management platforms (e.g., WordPress, Shopify, or HubSpot). This condensed code enables tracking features. For example, gtag.js is Google’s JavaScript snippet for capturing user analytics data from Google Search, Google Ads, YouTube, and other properties.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager lets you add, remove, edit, and otherwise manage a library of tags for your website. The Google tag (gtag.js) is just one tracking tag you can use. Other common tags/pixels include:
- Meta Pixel (for Facebook and Instagram metrics)
- Salesforce tags for customer relationship management
- Hotjar website heatmapping tools
- Crazy Egg site performance and error visualization tools
- Semrush ImpactHero for content insights
- LinkedIn Insight Tag for ad conversion tracking
- HubSpot tracking code
Each one of these tags is just a small portion of code, but when you’re tracking multiple pixels, it adds up. With GTM, you can control all those pixels independently of your website instead of adding tons of code to every page.
